Company of Heroes 2 – review

Company of Heroes 2: fun for exactly the same reasons Company of Heroes: Tales of Valour was fun. Photograph: Sega Europe

It's October 1942, and the German 6th Army is trapped on the banks of the Volga River between Red Army divisions stationed in Kalach and Stalingrad. At their lowest, temperatures hit -30°C. Wehrmacht soldiers, their supply lines cut, and chronically short of food, celebrate Christmas by eating the horses they rode in on. The civilians in Stalingrad are lucky to eat so well: diary accounts show that many of Stalingrad's denizens ate dogs and rats, and stole from their malnourished neighbours to survive. At the war's end, Stalingrad's population had fallen from 850,000 to just 1,500.

Here starts Company of Heroes 2's campaign: death and decay on the Eastern front.

Company of Heroes: Tales of Valour is a tough act to follow. It's widely credited with having revitalised real-time strategy games: out went detailed economy management, in came territorial capture. Resource-gathering RTS games turn off many casual gamers, since to achieve mastery it helps to have a little bit of decision maths up your sleeve. In Company of Heroes, infantry and vehicle classes balanced each other in a sort of six-way variant of 'rock, paper, scissors', while cover and firing lines made positioning central to tactics. Combat, as in the Second World War, was both fluid and attritional – grinding away at an enemy's front lines and rapid outflanking were both successful strategies. This worked better than the straightforward mass-'em-and-rush-'em strategies beloved of the genre's less imaginative offerings. Company of Heroes offers a kind of RTS different to Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander or Star Craft II – base building and warmaking on an epic scale is the approach of the former, while the latter demands micromanagement and mastery of short cuts.

These components of Company of Heroes, which made it both a commercially successful and enjoyable game, remain unchanged in Company of Heroes 2. Game developers Relic instead opt for a series of minor changes, and a graphical overhaul.

Unlockable enhancements are currently à la mode in the games industry. Here repeated playing yields decorative ribbons, vehicle and troop skins, and special abilities. This is close to the deck of cards system in Age of Empires, where experience provided small bonuses to unit or building characteristics.

Company of Heroes 2 also complicates tank conflict somewhat. A larger pool of tanks means each vehicle performs a more versatile role. They are no longer specialised infantry killers or anti-tank platforms, but multi-purpose vehicles that serve both offensive and defensive roles.

Less pleasingly, Company of Heroes 2 brings to life 'General Winter', the Soviet nickname for the extreme climactic forces that ravaged the Nazi invasion of Russia during Operation Barbarossa, and the invading French forces during the Napoleonic War. A nice idea, perhaps, but in practice it's irritating: your soldiers die unless they stand in cover, or by conveniently located fires dotted around the map. There is a good reason why, in the great majority of games, your troops do not die spontaneously of natural causes. In multiplayer, thankfully, this is optional.

A new line-of-sight mechanic enhances the tactical role of positioning: you'd better make sure to point your guns in the right direction. It also makes flanking smarter. Smoke can be used defensively, either to cover advancing troops or to shield tanks from heavy ordnance.

And, the new race – in the parlance both of RTS games, and of the Nazis – the Soviets, has a unique play style founded on numerical superiority. Stalin declared all retreating Red Army soldiers traitors to the Soviet Union, and this is nodded to with another mildly irritating feature, whereby retreating troops are intermittently shot by AI NKVD officers.

The visuals have been given a mandatory upgrade – six years have passed since Company of Heroes, after all – so when flamethrower meets flesh the resultant combustion is ripe with detail.

The nowadays seemingly obligatory plot device of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Battlefield 3, where a soldier's historical exploits are revisited during an interrogation, frames the campaign. The brutality of the Red Army is referenced, although we perhaps don't get a sense of the actual scale either of the conflicts, or of Russian war crimes. The game sees the Soviets execute a handful of Polish partisans, whereas individual mass graves of several thousand Polish soldiers have been unearthed in the Krakovian countryside. It is not hard to see why this wasn't included in the game. However, there is something a little silly about invading Berlin, which conflict involved two and a half million Red Army soldiers, under a population cap that limits you to around 70 troops.

Matchmaking has been improved, and there is a smörgåsbord of maps to choose from. Multiplayer offers ample scope to enjoy the game's mechanics to your heart's content. And a range of co-op and scenario missions allow you to experiment with different tactics.

These changes are so many extra bells and whistles, however, tied to Company of Heroes' prefabricated sleigh. It's fun for exactly the same reasons Company of Heroes: Tales of Valour was fun. Many hours of rewarding historical conflict await. Play the original first: it's considerably cheaper. But do not, under any circumstances, watch the straight-to-video 2013 film of the same name featuring Vinnie Jones. It gives you quite a good idea of what civilians in Stalingrad had to live through.